Research
The (Many) End(s) of History
Unwinding the long tradition of scientific apocalypse(s).
The world is, it seems, always on the verge of catastrophe. In fact, stories of global collapse go back as far as you care to look. Whether biblical flood or deadly pandemic, actual or imagined disasters often wear the familiar garments of apocalypse. The word, which comes from the Greek for 'unveiling', first referred to a Judeo-Christian revelation, but more recent iterations of this narrative have instead been tangled up in scientific concerns. In the eighteenth century, for example, French astronomers set off widespread panic by calculating the statistical likelihood of comets striking the Earth; within a hundred years, these catastrophic visions had shifted to feature dying suns and declining planets, linked to the popular reception of theories of evolution and entropy. By the twentieth century, apocalyptic fictions delivered us H. G. Wells' alien invasions and the out-of-control chemistry of Kurt Vonnegut's “ice nine”, Isaac Asimov's killer robots, Margaret Atwood's genetically engineered chimeras, and the irradiated wasteland of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Amid this anxious scrum of new technologies and threats at the midcentury, the sciences of measuring, modeling, and, eventually, predicting global climate were emerging. Climate science blossomed in the period after WWII, as scientists took advantage of advances in mechanical computation to deal with vast quantities of meteorological data and new theoretical insights about planetary systems. Armed with these powerful new tools of climatology, researchers began to grapple this young science to the problem of predicting the future of the Earth.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this young discipline began churning out scenarios of climate catastrophe, dressed in a familiar set of concerns about the paradoxical nature of human vulnerability and power. From the 1960s and 70s onward, scientific publications and popular science writing presented narratives of all-consuming ice ages and runaway global warming, sea level change and extinction, ultimately speculative scenarios but always with one foot planted in the real sciences of the Earth’s systems.
As the Lumley Junior Research Fellow in the History of Science, I investigate the history of these scientific narratives of crisis and collapse. Where did they come from, and where might they lead us? For the climate sciences, crisis has been part of the picture from the beginning, shaped by older debates about violent geological transformation, ice ages, and mass extinction. What did this mean about what scientists expected they would be able to learn about climates past or future? What kinds of outcomes, at what scales, were they concerned with predicting? And how did this affect what they ended up being able to do with climate data?
Though science is sometimes imagined as standing outside the realm of culture and narrative, a glance over the speculative catastrophes of the twentieth century reveals a clear arc connecting different disciplines through a shared set of narrative expectations. Take, for instance, fears of global nuclear radiation in the wake of an atomic war. This scenario was considered by military experts and modeled by scientists during the Cold War. Its very real dangers were highlighted in 1954 by the disastrous American Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test, in which a large plume of fallout enveloped the Marshall Islands in deadly radiation. Three years later, Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach presented a story of slow apocalypse via fallout. Meanwhile, climatologists were able to use the tragic circumstances of Castle Bravo to gather information about the architecture of the atmosphere, with its layer cake composition. Because nuclear fallout created a distinct and traceable signature as it moved around, the unplanned release of this large quantity of radioactive material provided an opportunity for scientists to understand how these layers connected different regions of the Earth.
In due course, these climatological insights about the composition and circulation of the atmosphere, along with the fictional and journalistic narratives of helpless witnessing generated by nuclear testing, later reappeared in changed form in the theorising of nuclear winter. This issue was controversially raised in a special feature of Parade magazine in 1983, by the American science writer and television host Carl Sagan. Sagan and coauthors had been working to model what would happen in the atmosphere in the wake of even a small nuclear war, and found that feedback effects would quickly cool the atmosphere, plunging the Earth into an artificial, global winter. “We have placed our civilization and our species in jeopardy” Sagan wrote with weighty authority in the Parade article, which was published before the peer reviewed scientific results. "Fortunately, it is not yet too late. We can safeguard the planetary civilization and the human family if we so choose. There is no more important or more urgent issue.”
And so the story kept going. It is not my aim to argue whether this framework was right or wrong for the situation, helpful or distracting. What interests me, instead, is the way that these narratives have traveled through different epochs of history, raising urgent concerns on some fronts while obscuring other realities, which might have offered other ways of relating to expertise, uncertainty, and control. After all, almost a half-century from Sagan's warning, it is fair to say that these “not yet too late” scenarios have not had the kind of political outcomes that their purveyors might have wished.
Ultimately, narratives of world-ending crisis present a compelling paradox. Always deeply speculative by their nature (since as far as we can tell “the world” has not “ended” yet), they deal in futures where any previous knowledge is tentative and incomplete in relation to the scale of the present concern. And yet this narrative framework nevertheless holds out a promise of certainty: the end of the world suggests the authority of the omniscient view. And in some sense it can be reassuring to know—or believe—what the future will hold, even if the answer is terrifying. The end of that story will offer, at least, the end of your worries.
Perhaps it is inevitable that in the face of these grand cataclysms, smaller or more familiar disasters end up seeming trivial. For instance, at the same time that American and European scientists were fretting about the possibility of famines set off by nuclear winter or climate cooling in the 1970s, real famines were bearing out tragic consequences across North Africa and South Asia, exacerbated by U.S. market policies. In this, we can see how apocalyptic narratives confound space and time, by transfiguring present day events playing out somewhere else into speculative future concerns which may or may not come to pass here. As the indigenous scholar Kyle White has pointed out, for peoples around the world who have been subject to genocide, forced removal, and environmental violence, the apocalypse has already come and gone—a way of life has been brutally, violently cut off—even as life goes on. These partial or unfinished apocalypses offer, among other valuable perspectives, an important corrective to the dangerous delusion of relying on the end of the world to solve today’s problems.
By Dr Amelia Urry (2025), Lumley Research Fellow in History of Science
This article was first published in Magdalene Matters Issue 56.
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